Welcome to the BLOX Digital (formerly TownNews) customer community! Connect with other BLOX Digital customers—and with us—to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.

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how to ad javascript

John Michael 8 years ago 0
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Is there a way to find a deeper revision history of stories

Bob Rose 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

It's contest season, and we had several "breaking" news articles that we want to present. We want to show how we covered the story incrementally. A story about a police shooting has 132 revisions, but only the last 20 show up. Is there a way to capture and view those earlier revisions?

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AMP pages and analytics including quantcast

Ashley 8 years ago in BLOX Total CMS 0

Is anyone currently delivering their GA and Quantcast tracking code to their AMP pages? Is that automatically included in the markup that TN is providing to Google AMP or do we need to add that using their insertion macros in option.head.utl?

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Printing stories and graphics from the e-edition

Andrea 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

We have entered a feature request to improve the printout of images in e-editions, so the images can be scaled to fit on one page.


1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?

Better printing of graphics (such as crossword puzzles) for our customers.


2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

We have several customers who like to print the crossword puzzle from the e-edition each day and solve the puzzle. Right now, the image prints out across 3 or 4 pages -- even when you try to scale it. Also, when a user prints a story from the e-edition, he has no control over the size of the printout.


3) How often would you use this feature?


Readers would use it daily.


4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?


Many employees also print stories and ads from the e-edition for various reasons. Having more control over how those printouts look would be helpful.


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Completed

Keywords shooting blanks (bug)

Lindy Bazner 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 8 years ago 8

I intend to send this as a ticket too, but we've discovered that when adding a keyword to an asset that there is a bug that creates a new blank keyword field below the keyword that you've added. Blox automatically saves all keywords typed into these fields, so I discovered even the blank ones are automatically saved. Yesterday, I cleaned out HUNDREDS of blank keywords out of our keyword list in the admin. I wanted to mention it for anyone else noticing that the keyword auto-dropdown isn't working quite right.

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Completed

Publication date not showing on updated stories

Rebecca Fellenbaum 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 8 years ago 9

When a story is updated and you choose to declare it an "important update" so the story says "updated" with the date and time the story was updated, the original publication date no longer shows in Flex. In Zen we were used to the original publication date remaining on the page and the updated date/time showing up next to it.


For example: Published: March 26 Updated: March 27

Now it just says: Updated: March 27

You have no idea when it was published!


Please bring back this feature! Without the original publication date showing, it is not clear to readers when the story was published.

Answer
Christine Masters 8 years ago

We have now released this change - and articles with now show the publication date and the updated date.


I think we should also add the TIME, which we left off on this pass. Let me know what you guys think!

+1

Using a form to sell products

Andrea 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Nick 8 years ago 3

Hello!


We currently host our own online store for things we sell such as books and page reprints.


I just noticed Blox has that ability through forms using PayPal and others. I would love to see some examples of how other newspapers have used forms to sell products.


Please share some links. :)


Thanks!

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Planned

Adding email and social sharing options to the e-edition

Andrea 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 8 years ago 3

The Herald-Dispatch has entered a feature request to add email and social media sharing options to the e-edition.


1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?

Our previous e-edition vendor had this option. Of the complaints we have received about the Town News e-edition (the vast majority of which is customers having trouble getting used to the new format), the top request has been “bring back email and social media sharing on stories.”


2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

Subscribers are accustomed to the option from our previous vendor. They have come to expect the option in our e-edition.


3) How often would you use this feature?

Subscribers would use it daily. It is a very popular feature with older readers.


4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

Subscribers would use it daily.


Would any other newspaper that uses the e-edition benefit from such a feature?


Thanks!
Andrea


+1

Feature Request: Setting to have the Find User window triggered by the Authors + (add an author to an asset) display only Admins by default.

Kevin M. Cox 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 8 years ago 2

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I've gotta imagine this would help all of y'all. Our Users list in TCMS continues to grow as we have employee turnover, meaning we increasingly have to wade through former staff members to find current ones.


We can't delete the users because it'll break some link, so Town News recommends just demoting them to normal users instead of admins which is fine.


The missing piece of the puzzle is the ability to then not see these normal users by default and only see admins when you go to add an author to an asset.


1. Greatly speeds up the process of adding an author to an asset. For hosted this weeds out all of the subscribers by default showing you only staff members. For TotalCMS this would show only current staff members and not former staff members who have been demoted to regular users.


2. Every single day.


3. Every single employee who uses TotalCMS.

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Adding Custom Proper(ties) to Assets Imported via Jobs

Robert Dundon 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Robert Dundon 8 years ago 5

I'm experimenting with some things. Currently, I'm testing a "job" that imports CSV file(s) and makes some assets in Blox.


I'd like to add some custom property to some of those assets depending on some data from the CSV file. Is that possible?

Answer

CSV is not a recommended way to load assets into BLOX - producing a NITF XML document is preferable and provides the ability to pass custom properties:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bXdTF1an2phFvY_EkLytalfNSE7RDLud-AbPk13RL-4/edit#heading=h.7zzo7uxp56y6

+3

Add a "Sites" columns in TCMS

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 8 years ago 2

I was manually sending AP assets to the web and found myself having to open them all to make sure they hadn't already been given a site tag. We do this every day and it finally occurred to me what would make it a much simpler process.


It would be nice to have a separate column for the presence of a site tag just like we have a "Sections" columns for section tags. Even a little box like this...


Image 129

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Completed

Join us | Get a sneak peek at our 2017 Roadmap

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At our December 2016 customer webinar, Brad Ward, TownNews.com's CEO, will share our 2017 Products & Services Roadmap. He'll highlight recent changes and give you a sneak peek at the exciting innovations that are in the works for BLOX CMS, BLOX Total CMS, TownNews.com iQ, the Content Exchange and more.


Big things are coming in 2017! Join us on December 8th at 10:30 AM CST to learn more.

Answer

Hi Nick,


We aim to offer these "sneak peek" webinars regularly, but, at the moment, we don't plan to post them publicly. However, I'd be happy to send you the slide deck. In fact, it's on the way to you right now. :)


Thanks for your interest!


Aaron Gillette

Marketing director

TownNews.com

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Moving or adding start/date time to workflow area?

Kyle Whitfield 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

Would it be possible to consider moving or adding the start/date time field to the workflow tab in an asset? That way a reporter or editor could more easily be reminded of changing the start date/time when they change the workflow, particularly when it's time for something to be published on the site.

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Creative Templates for DFP

Craig V 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Laura 8 years ago 5

Has anyone used the creative templates that Town News provides in DFP? We cannot get them to work. http://help.bloxcms.com/app/dfp_flex_templates/. If someone has one working, can you send me a link to check it out?

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Enable hotlinks in tagline

Brad Boner 8 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Nick 8 years ago 1

Any way to enable hotlinks in our tagline? Would like to have the ability to have our taglines read similar to:


Contact Brad Boner at photo@jhnewsandguide.com. Follow on Twitter @JHNGphoto.


Thanks!